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Are We being Sold Snake Oil by WG ?

Perfecting Preferential Premiums

We have a couple of YouTube videos answering the Wargaming portal article I posted yesterday. Making the very valid point of maybe players bought preferential MM premiums to get away from the sometimes awful Match Maker. The point about the MM struggling is somewhat invalid unless you are playing at 4am, the queue is little if any longer than normal and a few seconds wait time is no hardship for a better game. The last point is compensation, the only compensation is a wider choice of Trade In tanks and for this privilege you pay Gold ie. real money with no Gold (or heaven forfend cash) buy back.

The argument about screwing tier 10 MM is utter bullshit, sorry. If they wanted to include preferential MM tanks they could, they just need to amend the MM program. It’s entirely possible. Dez did an interesting poll on his last video about this topic asking if people would be prepared to wait another 30 seconds or so to get better MM,,,,, spoiler alert….. but when I looking 90+ per cent said they would wait for better MM

Its the combination of 3-5-7 and special matchmaking. One single special matchmaking tank results in a non tier 10 game for 30 people. And six Tier 10 tanks need an other match, which then results in a massive number of 3-5-7 games with Tier 10 as top.

The special matchmaking tanks are the main reason that you meet almost always Tier 10 with you Tier 8.

that is my understanding as well and since i play regular tier 8 tanks quite often i can confirm the MM for that tier is just terrible. therefore the preferential MM of those premiums need to get fixed asap – even though i have several of those myself. its just not worth screwing MM for every other tier 8 and not to mention that the preferential MM isn’t that preferential anymore anyway.

Too bad it won’t ever solve the issue. You always have to queue 14 players to be XP pinata for 6 players in this retarded template.
As time goes, more people are going to get to tier 10 and there will be less players in tier 8 and the issue is gonna get more severe.
Get rid of this retarded MM, because forced templates like that are always going to create issues.

it works well enough for every other tier except for 8 where nearly all of the played preferential MM tanks are. if playing tier 8 get just about the same as the other tiers it will be a huge improvement.

also your concern is invalid because in that case the MM is build to solve the overpopulation by creating more +/-1 or even 0 tier spread games instead.

The 3/5/7 template is first in the queue for creating battles. If the MM could handle it by making more +1 and +0 games, it would do so already. Yet it still forces vast majority of tier 8s to play against 10s. I’m top tier in 3/5/7 in my tier 10s way too often. You know what actually works? An old, dynamic system, where MM just fills in the gaps around few rules (arty, TDs), rather than squeezing people into forced forms. It had issues, but not as much as the current mess.

3/5/7 is just not enjoyable to anyone. Even when you are at the top all of the focus is on you and that gets ugly unless you drive something very good, you have to rely on 2 bots in your team to not die in the first minute and there isn’t enough HP around to have a nice battle. I’m so often chasing after damage because the teams just melt. No matter at what tier I play, I feel like I’m playing at tier 4.

But WG won’t listen. It’s like they are on a mission to make this game into a snorefest where nothing you do matters.

Only that except 3/5/7 there are 5/10 and 15, so instead of forcing 3/5/7, there may be more other modes.
But somehow no, 3/5/7 has to happen often just because. Probably to give meat for these 6 top tier tanks, and drain gold from the rest of poor losers struggling against +1 and +2 tier tanks.

Also in case of tier VIII premium with +1MM, it was rather tier IX than tiers VII and VI.

It will be great to fight in T14 against T29, in B2 against, well, any tier VI. Or in Soviet Valentine that struggles against other Soviet Valentine.

No, pref MM tanks result in more 5/10 and 15 player team matches for tier 9 and 10 because there are not enough tier 8s for thst template available. 3/5/7 is the first MM template that the MM will use all the time unless there are not enough tanks in the tiers needed. Removing pref. MM tanks will increase the number of 3/5/7 games for tier 10 and 9 on top, making tier 8 and 7 less fun for everyone and vastly decreasing the prifitability of tier 8 tanks due to more use of prem ammo.
Making 5/10 or even 15 the preferred template would be the best way to go. Single tier matches are the most fun games to be had. Thats why Frontline is so much more fun then random.

‘The special matchmaking tanks are the main reason that you meet almost always Tier 10 with you Tier 8’

sorry utter bullshit…. virtually no one plays pref MM these days and so surely by this argument the MM would be getting better….. but I don’t know about you the tier 8s I drive always get tier 10 and 9 games STILL.

You have no clue , really. Those 6 tier X tanks youre talking about can be put in a full tier X game you know. As well as those PMMT can also be put in full tier games, or as top tiers is 357. When they say MM struggle with those tanks is because they force MM to put lower than IX tanks as bottom tier in 357 or 5/10 most of the time.

I’m pretty sure the point is that regular tier 8s meet tier 10s all the time, because other type of battles are taken by the tanks with preferential MM.

The bad part for WG is that I don’t give a shit about what kind of fuck up they commited. They are the responsible ones for making MM that doesn’t work and I’m not going to pay for that. Besides, there are two easy solutions to this problem – get rid of the retarded 3/5/7 MM or +2 MM whatsoever.

Even if MM is fair 3/5/7 template means that you will be 3 times on top every 15 battles and 7 times on bottom every 15 battles. It’s simple and it’s not fair. But WG stuff is just to stupid to see that.

so, before they complained that preferential MM premiums were OP and pay-to-win, now they complain from fixing that? sure, the MM struggle might just be an excuse but isn’t it better than allow the existence of premiums like the E-25?
in my opinion it is much better to have those OP premiums on bottom tier matches (battles where they play against the +2 on their MM range) and face the struggles everyone else face, than having them play mostly same tier battles where they can simply rely on the tank to solve things for them in some ocasions

and about the trade system, you, as a costumer, were always given a chance of paying or waiting for a better deal, for that reason you CANNOT complain because WG is free to define a price for it, in this case they defined the price of the KV-5 at 7500 Gold (which might suggest it will become Tier 7) but other Tier 8 HT’s cost at least 12000G, in the end they are giving the players 2 choices, keeping the KV-5 instead of removing it because of being an hassle to balance OR pay 2000G (about ~€9) to trade for a Tier 8 HT and still get it for less than what others paid (in gold) for the same Tier 8 HT’s (for those who haven’t noticed that is called a discount)

nope, I do not work for WG and have as a personnal policy not buying these kind of premiums with inflated prices from the start, afterall do not forget that they were sold for more than normal Tier 8 premiums due to being totally OP and having preferential MM, hence why they were removed from the stores and sold in special ocasions
furthermore you can no longer look at the KV-5 as the old KV-5, they haven’t specified which Tier it will be but based on the changes it seems Tier 7 will be a perfect fit, afterall the objective was always avoid Tier 10’s that can easily pen it from the front with regular ammo, if it really becomes Tier 7 it would mean that you have to think of the KV-5 as a Tier 7 premium HT and thus it’s ingame cost in Gold should reflect it being Tier 7
in my opinion if you consider the cost difference between a Tier 5 premium HT and a Tier 8 of the same class, 7500G seems like a good fit for a Tier 7, that is, for example, the cost of the Tier 8 Super Pershing/T26E1-1 “Super Pershing” that is known as underpowered at Tier 8 (if it existed the ideal Tier would b 7.5)

considering all of that, understanding that it became worth 7500G because that’s what it will cost to new owners to buy it and considering that YOU ARE NOT OBLIGATED to trade it for another Tier 8 if you don’t want to but also realizing that most, if not all, of those who have paid the inflated price of the KV-5 most likely own other Tier 8’s and do not need to trade it, so honestly cannot see this as an attempt to get more money because it’s up to the players

on a final note, why exactly is there a need to trade the KV-5 for a Tier 8 premium HT? everyone knows that Tiers 5~7 are those where you can grind and make profit with regular tanks, that means that while the KV-5 won’t get as high of a bonus as it did at Tier 8, now at Tier 7 it will still be quite profitable and might even come close to the earnings on the much more expensive Tier 8

You try to mix 2 things.
OP premiums are simply badly balanced tanks that WG couldn’t balance (nerf) with ease, because they are something sold for money.
Preferential MM tanks are such because they were too weak since beginning, and some people decided, they are ok like that, and bought them.
Now such people are being thrown into MM craphole.

im looking forward to the removal of preferential MM i might buy a kv5 now and i look forward to seeing the changes to the FCM50T and the JT 8.8

everyone complaining bought the gold they need to pay for a new tier 8 prem, you are getting the current gold value you cant buy something for 40$ and expect to get 60$ back so you can get something better

Imagine that you buy a car and a year later the car manufacturer comes to you garage, switches the engine for a shit one and tells you to deal with it or PAY HIM to give you newer, more expensive model with the same shit engine. I guess you’d be fine with it? Maybe you’ll be happy because the new car will have nicer, overpriced mats?
That’s not how real world works. WG fucked up and now they have the audacity to try to make some cash from that fuck up. Open your goddamn eyes.
Go tell Volkswagen that they should learn from WG and there’s some nice buck to be made from the emission scandal. After all you’d gladly pay!

More expensive model…nobody wants your 99 honda civic for a 2018 mustang. do i have the kv5 no do i want it no, unless they go through with these changes and i hope they make changes to the other preferential tanks

well… just saying that VW did this with diesel cars 😀 so WG is just using dieselgate business model 😀 (yes in some countries VW refunded customers, but in my country they just reworked the software which lowered mileage and increases adblue consumption 😀 )

@Chucha
If WG wants to play the “it’s their service, it’s their TOS, deal with it” game, then I’m waiting for them to nerf the Defender, Skorpion G and Chrysler K. After all they have nothing but our and game’s best interest in mind, riiiiight?
It’s not about this being an illegal practice. It’s about the fact that WG is a bunch of greedy asshats that fucked up, deny and lie about the real problem called 3/5/7 MM and now they want to squeeze cash from the players they are trying to fuck over.
Defending practices like that means you are either on WG’s payroll or you are just not-particularly-smart, as you have nothing to gain and everything to lose.

yeah, the FCM 50T would be fun to play as a tier 7, it has Tier 6 armour and gun (120/80/80 is the same as ARL44 and the 90mm is also the same), 212mm of should still prove competitive against some Tier 9’s
the JT8.8 has a Tier 7 gun but Tier 9 armour, although maybe a ROF buff and a higher pen regular ammo could make it work as a Tier 8 facing Tier 10’s

“everyone complaining bought the gold they need to pay for a new tier 8 prem, you are getting the current gold value you cant buy something for 40$ and expect to get 60$ back so you can get something better”.

The fact, that you chose to ignore, is that preferential MM premium tanks are NOT cheaper that their regular MM counterparts. Which means that, unless after the rework into regular MM tanks their price is increased by at least 8 euros (the cost of 2000 gold), your statement about “buying something worth 60$ for 40$” is so ignorant it’s not even funny.

Seen so much whining about this topic. Personally I rarely play my pref mm tanks anymore so any change would be welcome. Also 6 of the top 7 played tanks (according to vbaddict) are all regular mm tier 8 tanks. KV-5 is at 395th place. Hardly think this will have much impact other than people actually playing their old premiums again.

Im looking forward to pref MM going the way of the dodo… these tanks arent good, even in their pref MM brackets, hell most of them are still bad in same tier MM. The changes to the KV-5 stand to make it atleast passable in tier 10 battles, and pretty decent in tier 9 ones. I dont play any of my pref MM tanks anymore. Bring on these changes, they cant be any worse than the tanks are now.

MM it self, including 3/5/7 is fine, even at tier 8 and +/-2 as a whole is way better than +/-1 or same tier MM.

4005’s can actually one shot a lot of tier 8 tanks just by penning them with HESH… Im not really sure where youre going with this.

If a 4005 pens the lower plate of a Chrysler GF it can get 1 shot. Can also 1 shot an M4 49 if it pens its cupola. OPr it can kill a Mauerbrecher if it pens its cupola or its MG weakspot. Or a Patriot if it pens the lower plate. Or a Lowe if it pens the turret face below the mantlet or the lower plate.

So tell me… how will the KV-5 be any different? (Other than it will have a slightly better than average chance to survive compared to most tier 8 heavy tanks).

Oh of course… clearly because I agree with this change Im a WG bot. Thats original. It cant because I can see the bigger picture, and can realize that pref MM tanks rewceiving buffs and losing their Pref MM is actually better for them and for the game. Nope certainly cant be that. Cant be that I enjoy using my brain as a bottom tier rather than easy mode stomping as a top tier. Get lost, anon.

I’ve been in contact with the ACCC over the last two days. Essentially these changes in their current state will breach Australian consumer protection laws for any tank purchased in the shop (doesn’t cover ingame gold purchases). If they think their EULA or ToS will save them they can have a chat with Valve and ask how that went.
They will have to offer a full cash refund, not in game credit if they remove pref MM to comply with Australian consumer laws.

I think there are similar laws in the UK and EU that protect digital items paid for with money and they differentiate between items obtained via in game mechanics and those purchased in an online store.

WG is bending us over and will lube us up by teasing some new premium tanks you can switch to for a low low price. These new tanks will never go on sale… at least till the next big event, maybe Christmas at the latest. As people have said they are hurting their most loyal supporters and collectors the most.

Not only EU has Consumer contract laws, including Digital contract rules, every member state may have it’s own set of rules. I don’t think Wargaming even considered that. My guess is that they hope that players will think of starting legal battle over what is essentially not a huge sum of money as too bothersome. But i secretly hope that someone brings class action lawsuit against them.

We could always go back to the days where you would be one of 3 tier 6’s in a Tier 8 match, or those wonderful situations where you’re the only top tier tank — and you’re driving something like a Stuer Emil and the other side has a T29. That’s what the template system was meant to fix – it means that, even if you’re bottom tier, you’ve got at least a chance to shoot at something, and you’re at least not trying to match a campy TD vs a heavy tank.

Now, is the template system perfect? Nope, because it’s heavily dependent on server population, and you can still get into weird matches e.g. an AMX 50B does NOT fill the same role as a Type 5 heavy. But there’s no such thing as a perfect MM system, and a system that’s 100% fair is also 100% boring. (Basically, it’s mid 2000s Deathmatch, except it’s a tenth of the speed. No thank you.)

In other words, I still think it’s definitely better than the old MM, because I’m never in a game where I can’t contribute. Even if I’m almost always bottom tier at Tier 8, there are 7 other tanks that are my tier, and 5 other tanks that, depending on matchup, I’ll take my chances with. That’s 12 out of 15 I can dance with – and if one of the Tier X is an artillery or a badly played scout, I’ll gamble with that as well.

In general, there’s no such thing as perfect MM, because for all those matches where you’re top tier in the perfect tank, you screwed everybody on the other team – and those 15 other people are the ones screaming that MM sucks.

As for the changes to the KV-5 — we’ll see what comes out the prod server. They’re just preliminary stats and tests. Everybody forgets the KV-5 is pretty mobile for a 100 ton heavy — it might be that instead of embracing the heavy meta as the old KV-5, you end up taking it down to where the mediums play as a mobile heavy and use the DPM to shred stuff (2500 DPM makes it better than every Tier 8 except the freaking Caernarvon), and try to get the occasional ram in. Going to miss reverse sidescraping though.

A bunch of tier VIs can deal with a single T29, 5 tier IXs and 7 tier VIIIs will have a hard time dealing with 3 tier Xs.
Matches like that back in the day were an abnormality, not a fucking FIRST RULE.
And I’m waiting for you to tell me what meaningful contribution you can have in your tier VIII heavy, going to the heavy flank and the first thing you meet is a sidescrapped IS-7 blocking the entire flank, when their tier VIIIs sit behind. Either you tier Xs kill it and you get some scraps or they get killed and you get roflstomped. Truly a meaningful contribution. And matches like that are now A RULE. Stop defending this piece of shit MM, it does not work.

MM is just a big pIle of bull shit. In a 3 tier match the low tier most have the same thoughts as I. That is… you are just a easy target for the 2 higher tiers that you can’t damage even with gold shells. I know quite a few players who rather go drown them selfs instead playing in a unfair game. The trend is getting more common every day. FUCKED the MM and make all matchstick a single tier or a two tier match. Both of these would a least make playing the game more fair than the BULL SHIT 3 tier match. Maybe we should all quite WOT and look for a game that is more fair and they don’t fuck you like WOT. As far as premiums go I sold all that I had and will never buy one again as these are just a rip off that they intend to nerf with in a short period of time and are useless to have

I either want a full refund in REAL MONEY of all the tanks I bought with REAL MONEY if they are going to remove the only reason why i bought said tanks with REAL MONEY.

If you buy a roadster car, and then, during your next inspection, the garage where you bought the car from changes it into a minivan, telling you “we improved it, now it can transport more people than before”, what are you going to do? Yes, sue them. Especially if they are so ridiculous and keep telling you “Well, if you didn’t want a minivan, you have two options now: Keep it anyway or give us more money to get something similar to your old roadster you had, but with less fun.”…

I don’t care for PMM tanks. I have a couple of them, but powercreep made them irrelevant on their own tier anyway. The situation doesn’t change, they are just as bad in a tier 9 game as they will be in a tier 10 game. Irrelevant, just like any tier 8 tank. Buffing tanks only increases powercreep. Tier 6 and 7 will be fucked even harder.

The problem is that they made a MM that forces us in a 3-5-7 template that nobody likes. When they describe the MM problem in that article, they basically tell us how the MM works. The MM is flawed and they are killing it’s symptoms, in stead of fixing the actual problem. They create a problem and we have to pay for it. I don’t care about PMM, but I understand the players who don’t want to lose the PMM status. It’s what they paid for.

I just keep thinking: how big will the shitstorm be if they remove PMM and the MM stays shit?

It has a chance of improving the things by 20% at best. So you are going to see tier 10s in your 8s 50% of the time anyway. It’s basic logic that in 3/5/7 battles you’ll be 3 times a top tier and 7 times a bottom tier in 15 battles. As time goes on less people will be playing tier 8s (more people grinding 9s, playing 9s, playing 10s, not touching 8s because the MM is shit) and MM is going to struggle even more with making battles as long as this retarded template gets forced as a first thing.

+ -1 MM would solve all problems, the game would be more pleasant and longer, gold would be less used, stock grind would be more pleasent… A good example for this is the popular Frontline event.
Who in WG persistently prefers + -2 MM, Wiktor?

Here’s the argument to anyone saying preferential mm tanks are the problem rather than the matchmaker: Tier 4. Tier 4 has maybe like 2 or 3 preferential mm tanks and very rarely when I play in tanks like my Luchs or my Hetzer or my M5 will I ever see just all tier 4 tanks. Mostly I’ll either be downtiered against tier 5s or 6s every time. The matchmaker doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. It’s supposed to at the end of every game determine your chances at being high tiered after every so many games. People are always going to play tier 9 over tier 8 because you always have +1/-2 matchmaking which makes them more appealing than any tier 8 currently with the way the matchmaker works. There still won’t be a point in playing tier 8 because tier 9 is just that much better in matchmaking. Things won’t really change with the matchmaker because you’ll still have a massive influx of tier 9s just because they get flatout better matchmaking in the first place and are far more competitive than almost any tier 8. Besides, they’re going to have to overbuff the living hell out of most of the preferential mm tanks just to make them remotely competitive with the current tier 8 premiums (T26E5, Skorpion G, Defender, etc.).

You know what bothers me? They are aware of there PMM ‘problem’ for a long time, but they still try to sell them. During christmas they even made special offers for PMM tanks. Not the mention the Type 59 hype they created to sell lootboxes.

The issue here is that preferential mm tanks are completely designed around preferential mm. They aren’t designed as tier 8s, but rather tier 7.5s. Even with the current changes planned to the KV-5, it just doesn’t hold its value like a Skorpion G or a Defender because they’re just flatout overpowered and sadly that’s the meta of tier 8 in random battles. Even if it somehow manages to fix the matchmaker, tier 9 is still way more appealing than tier 8 since they get +1/-2 matchmaking all the time. I honestly don’t believe that preferential mm tanks are breaking the matchmaker, but rather that the matchmaker isn’t working as intended because it’s not just at tier 8 where you get bottom tiered all the damn time. It happens a lot at tier 7, tier 6, tier 5, and tier 4. Even at tier 10 you rarely get to see tier 9s let alone tier 8s unless you get lucky. It’s the matchmaker’s fault, not preferential tanks. This is just an easy way for Wargaming to resell old tanks that nobody wants anymore as a “better” tank with buffed stats or to let people trade in their preferential mm tanks plus more money to get a more expensive tank like a Lowe or a T34. It’s an easy money grab tactic, they probably could give two shits about fixing the matchmaker at this point since it’s been broken for months now.

It’s easy to fix MM. One tier games. T10s play T10s, with no waiting for lower tiers to beat up on.

3/5/7 is not being done to help lower tiers. It is being done so that T10s are guaranteed 12 lower-tier tanks to bully around. And that is being done to pad stats for the T-10 players, and to compensate them for the poor economics of playing their babies.

So, three-step simple fix. It would take about 10 minutes to program, and a short cycle to test.

This would NOT tax the MM. More people would play (witness the popularity of Frontline). But, I can understand the developers’ concerns, so sure, test it in Sandbox or give it a longer cycle in Supertest/public test.

By far the worst point of it all is that you can’t tell me they didn’t know what they were going to do with PMM for at least the last 6 months.

During that time they have sold a lot of rare tanks including what was basically promotion of gambling via their loot boxes for those desperate to get their hands on Type 59.

They are also continuing to sell them now via in game shop so frankly you have no idea what you’re buying at the moment as it will be substantially changed to undisclosed statistics in the future, with a potential of having to pay up to 2000 gold on top if you’re not happy about the changes. I’m not sure on the legality of that as it wouldn’t fly in any other industry.

What they essentially saying now is that they have screwed the MM, don’t want to fix it and deflecting the blame onto PMM tanks that they were and still are short sighted for selling. You can’t make this up, I wonder how badly they have to keep insulting the intelligence of the player base before something has to give.

if they are going to removed the whole reason why people bought these tanks then they should give you your money back in real world money, not shitty gold bullshit. im not surprised wargaming is losing plays, they will probably lose more over this.

tier 10 tanks should never meet tier 8, that would fix the problem
tier 10 tanks MM is -2/0 , more balanced would be -1/0
tier 9 tanks MM is -2/+1 , more balanced is -1/+1
tier 5, 6, 7, 8 MM is -2/+2 , could be left unchanged
tier 4 tanks MM is -1/+2, which is the most unfair
tier 1, 2, 3 tanks MM is +1/+1, which is the most balanced